In the recent unprecedented address to the joint House of Congress, President Obama was heckled by Congressman Joe Wilson. Obama was assuring the world that his plan would not cover illegal aliens when Congressman Wilson could no longer stand it and he shouted out, “You lie!”

While shouting down the President may have demonstrated a lack of decorum in this august body, it was what many people in this country felt in their hearts.

The amazing thing to me though, was not the heckling, which I do regularly during the news every evening when I hear lies like this. The amazing thing was the look on Speaker Pelosi’s face when she heard him shout. It was priceless and something I know I will cherish for some time to come.

Personally, I would like to see more of our representatives in Washington standing up for what we believe and worrying less about what others think of it. After all, part of their job is to act as a check on the powers of the Executive Branch, and that means keeping the President honest.

But that’s just My Arrogant Opinion

It was several weeks ago, I heard it plainly, but did not comprehend what it was I was hearing.  It sounded like hundreds of thousand tiny voices screaming in terror suddenly cut short.  I saw the news coverage of it this morning on CBS Sunday Morning.  What I found hard to believe was that there was no outrage over the killings, no moral judgments being leveled at the killer.  It seems that it all depends on the victims as to whether or not a public cry is made.

These weren’t starving children in Africa being slaughtered, they weren’t people at all.  And no, not cute little puppies in some puppy mill in Southern California.  These were the screams of an entire colony of ants as molten aluminum was poured into their homes and burrows.  They were killed in order to excavate their tunnels and see what marvelous engineers they were.  Emphasis on ‘were.’  They are no more as they were killed out to the very last ant.

Now had these been sea turtles, there would have been such a hue and cry as has seldom been heard, and don’t even consider what litigation would have been started had these been baby seals, or polar bears.  A race horse being put down to end the suffering of two broken ankles brought PETA out of the woodwork, but not for these defenseless ants.  Who speaks for them? Who will take the fight to protect the wild ants?

What hypocrisy!  There were no Hollywood actors protesting their plight or raising money to prevent this from ever happening again.  Just the remains of hundreds of thousands of tiny corpses surrounded by the aluminum that was the instrument of their demise.

But that’s just My Arrogant Opinion.

Maybe I am just noticing things now more than in years past, but there are some things that just absolutely cause my hair to stand on end when I hear them these days. I was driving to work this morning when an ad came on the radio for a politician running for office in Mississippi. They were pointing out the candidate was a born again Christian and knew how God took care of us. Well, so far so good. I am a born again Christian and I too believe that God takes care of us, maybe they should have left it alone right there, but not today. They went on to say how this wonderful candidate knew that government needed to take care of our needs as well.

That is when I came to the realization that screaming at the radio doesn’t seem to do any good at all. Where does anyone get the idea that the job of government is to take care of us? THEY WORK FOR US! They are not our parents or guardians, we tell them what to do. It is not their position to take care of us!

But, that is just My Arrogant Opinion.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio was back in the news last week. If you aren’t familiar with Sheriff Joe take a minute and visit the Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff’s Office web site. The Associated Press ran a hit piece on him and his work targeting illegal aliens in the area. The piece titled, “Arizona sheriff stirs furor with crackdown on illegals,” posted on Brietbart.com, takes a decidedly liberal slant on the enforcement of our laws, but I don’t suppose anyone is really surprised at that. Warner Toddy Huston gives a very insightful analysis of the article at Newsbusters.org with his piece entitled, “An Example of AP’s Bias in Favor of Illegal Immigration.”

I had heard about Sheriff Joe some months back on the radio when some talk show host was discussing crime and Sheriff Joe’s unique approach to maintaining his jail. I have often thought that we needed more people enforcing our laws like Joe, after all, if they can live better on the inside than the outside why should any criminal be concerned about getting locked up?

It should be something of a wakeup call to the liberals in office that with an approval rating of over 75%, people are liking what Joe has managed to accomplish as Sheriff of the 3rd largest county in the United States. People want to see inmates out doing hard labor, they want the punishment to actually make them think before committing more crimes in their back yards.

Why are we so concerned with the well being of the very criminals who have broken the rules of a civilized society. By breaking those rules, they have told us that they do not believe in them so why should we treat them with such deference? I think the main stream media needs to wake up and start seeing what the rest of us see, that our country is headed for trouble, and that trouble is of our own making. Let’s stop coddling criminals, there are plenty of things they can do to start repaying this society for their anti social behavior. Let’s take a page out of Joe’s playbook and start taking our cities and towns back.

But that’s just My Arrogant Opinion.

I noticed on the news last night that Reverend Wright was trying to make nice with the MSM and tell them that he felt that he had been done wrong with the constant looping of his “God Damn America” comments. He thoughtfully pointed out that anyone could be made to look bad with a single comment taken out of context and looped and played over and over like this one was.

The problem is, this comment was not taken out of context. Sure the MSM had to shorten the bite to fit their time constraints, but when the story hit, there was no shortage that I was aware of in hearing the comments in their complete context. I know that I first heard them on Rush Limbaugh’s Radio Program while I was eating lunch. I remember it well as I was stunned that this could have possibly been uttered from the pulpit not even a week after 9/11.

Ed Morrissey posted a piece entitled “The Wright Stuff: ABC provides the context” on HotAir.Com yesterday and it contains the printed transcript of the entire tirade Wright made from his pulpit. It is pretty much as I remember hearing it on the radio when the story first hit, so his complaint that this was taken out of context seems to just reinforce the idea that this is not the person best qualified to be the ‘spiritual advisor’ to POTUS.

But, that is just My Arrogant Opinion.

April 22, 2008 Earthday. Everyone needs to call their legislators and tell them that it is time to SCREW THE CARIBOU and DRILL THE ANWAR! If we are so Earth conscious, and nature is what we are trying to get back to, I wish someone could explain to me what other animal in history has spent so much effort in trying to starve itself out of existence. Maybe that is what killed the dinosaurs, they realized that dino flatulence was a greenhouse gas and since they didn’t have opposable thumbs decided to just starve themselves into extinction rather than continue producing gases that polluted the pristine Earth they inhabited.

If we don’t wake up soon, that is what we are going to do in the name of global warming. We are turning all our corn into a very inefficient fuel, causing shortages of corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans. You can already feel these higher prices at the store. Countries in other parts of the world are having food riots because of shortages, how long will it be before the same thing happens here? How did one man touting junk science manage to become so influential? Al Gore will not face questions about this thing called Global Warming from scientists with opposing positions. If he was sure of the facts that would be the very thing to do in order to win more converts to his position, but it is an indefensible position that he has taken. There is quality research that contradicts this man made global warming theory, but the main stream media will not cover it. It doesn’t make headlines to tell people that everything is okay, and that there isn’t anything to worry about. It only makes the news when there is disaster looming.

Well, there is disaster looming! We will, for the first time ever become an importer of grain this year. America, the bread-basket of the world will have to import wheat. It isn’t that we don’t have the land or technology to produce it. Our government is paying subsidies to get corn for ethanol manufacture. We have vast oil reserves off our coasts, but we won’t allow ourselves to tap them. Of course that doesn’t stop anyone else from moving in and drilling, that way we can pay to import OUR OWN OIL!

I remember the Time article from the 1970′s warning us of a coming ice age and the dangers of Global Cooling. Luckily we woke up in time before some power hungry ex-vice President got on the bandwagon and found that he could finally get people to listen to him when he was talking about a fantasy. Waking up gave us about 30 years, but do our children have a future?

Call your legislators and tell them to stop the ethanol subsidies and start drilling where we know there are reserves, so that our children will at least have food to eat as the planet fries. 202-224-3121 Call them today, after all, it is EARTHDAY.

Our rights to free speech have come under fire of late and that should be of concern for all Americans. We are hearing terms we have never heard of before like “Hate Speech,” which is not defined by our Constitution. Exactly what is “Hate Speech,” and why is it a danger to our freedom?

Several months ago a comic was on a stage in California, that bastion of liberal theology, doing a stand-up routine. He was being heckled by some blacks in the audience and he responded angrily. Michael Richards was the comic, and he called the blacks, “niggers.” This started a firestorm that, like the California wildfires last year went completely out of control.

Someone in the club had a recording device and filmed the altercation. This recording made it onto the news. All of a sudden we have Civil Rights activists involved as Al Sharpdon and his ilk started yelling about his hate speech and use of a racial epitaph. The same epitaph that has been used as stock in trade by black comedians for years. I can’t imagine a Richard Pryor set that didn’t have him using nigger repeatedly.

Ah, but Richards was hurling invective at blacks in the audience. Don Rickles made his fortune by insulting audience members, people who shelled out hard earned money to sit in the audience hoping that he would pick them out for some insult. These are the types of things you expect in a comedy club setting, if you don’t like this type of thing, don’t go to the club. If you go to the club, and feel insulted, don’t go back. You do not have the right to infringe upon the comic’s material by recording it and handing it off to the news media.

While Sharpdon was demanding apologies and boycotts I am curious where that champion of individual rights the ACLU was while Richards was being subjected to an unauthorized video surveillance. Isn’t this the type of thing that they just live for? Seems to be a little hypocritical to me, that they would be silent on this issue. Maybe it is only when the issue is on their liberal radar that they stand up to defend the rights of the individual.

While I don’t agree with Richard’s outburst, I strongly support his right to use whatever language he chose to express his anger. Better to have invective flying across the room than to have bullets doing the same.

In the same time frame, we have another Hollywood type getting into trouble. Mel Gibson went out and got drunk, then got stopped while driving under the influence. It just so happened that the officer who stopped him was Jewish, and Mel took the opportunity to make some racial slurs against Jews. Again, not the smartest thing that could be done, but certainly his right to express his feelings. Let’s not forget either, that the man was drunk when the slurs were made. Since according to the law he was not capable of operating a vehicle safely, how can he be said to be making good decisions in his choice of words? He had just demonstrated the fact that his judgment was impaired by the fact he was driving when under the influence. In the words of the left, it wasn’t his fault.

These incidents were followed a bit later by some comments on a morning radio program by Don Imus. Don is paid to be edgy and to be controversial on the air, it is his stock in trade. Imus made a comment about the Rutgers women’s basketball team when he said they looked like a bunch of ‘nappy headed hos’. Now in the same sentence he talked about how he thought the girls on the Tennessee team they were playing were good looking, there were blacks on both teams.

In rushes Al Sharpdon to call for the firing of Imus, screaming ‘Racism!’ raising such a stink that NBC did terminate Don Imus for his remarks. Of course Don turned around and sued NBC because he had a contract where he was contractually obligated to be controversial. He won.

Now I’m not wild about Don’s humor, but it is his right to say what he wants without being labeled a racist by some self-righteous black activist. When we start bowing to the pressure brought to bear by some special interest, we come dangerously close to losing one of the freedoms this nation was built upon. What may even be worse is that these activists are trying to dictate our attitudes and morals. If we continue to allow it, how far will it go?

I was saddened a little bit yesterday. My daughter went to my old college for new student orientation. While I am proud that she is going to my old Alma Mater, I was saddened by the fact that my old Alma Mater isn’t the same as she used to be.

Our old school mascot for Arkansas State University was Runnin’ Joe. All over Jonesboro, when I was there you could find the caricature Indian all over town. In a fit of Political Correctness, some one high up in their ivory tower decided that some one, some where might be offended by this cartoon image of an Indian. The decision was made to change the school mascot from an Indian, to a wolf. Now they are no longer the Arkansas State University Indians, but the Arkansas State University Red Wolves.

This was all after a transition period where the Runnin’ Joe image was replaced by a more traditional Indian figure. I guess that was to make the change less traumatic for those of us who loved ol Runnin’ Joe.

Our Constitution has a clause in it that prohibits the use of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. Over my lifetime, more years than I care to admit, I have heard that phrase bandied about in arguments against the practice of capital punishment. I really don’t see this a case against the death penalty myself.

I think the first thing that needs to be determined is what the framers meant by the terminology ‘Cruel and Unusual.’ We have methods of execution that are anything but cruel. Lethal injection is not cruel, anymore than being put under before surgery is cruel. Electrocution might be considered cruel, but it is probably harder for the witnesses to observe than for the condemned to experience.

Cruelty stems not so much from the method, but the intent. There are truly horrible ways to die, and some of those are being used in this day and age as a form of capital punishment. Take for example stoning. This is a method of execution currently in use in some Muslim Nations in the Middle East. Burying a man to his waist in the ground then throwing stones at him until he is dead is not something I want to witness, but it is an acceptable method for some crimes in Muslim countries.

Given the choice between lethal injection, even with dirty needles, or stoning, I think most people would choose the injection as a merciful way to be executed. Cruelty implies a desire to hurt or inflict pain. That is not what capital punishment should be, but a simple execution of the decision of the court.

If we are not going to actually use the penalty, we should not even have it available. That becomes cruelty to the victims and their families. If we are going to have it in our toolkit for punishing criminals, it should be used, and used consistently. When it is used consistently, it ceases to be unusual and thus becomes constitutional. Viola!

The biggest benefit to actually using capital punishment is that it reduces recidivism to 0%. There is no concern about a violent criminal being paroled years after the conviction, no continual drain on scarce resources eliminating pressure on the penal system.

Barack Obama, seems to have a pretty good handle on life in America. All us poor folks just cling to our guns and religion. Well, I guess that is when we aren’t punishing our daughters with babies.

It seems like the man cannot open his mouth without sticking his foot in it. Which, I hasten to add, is a good thing because before the race started to get heated up all we heard was him pontificating about Change, and Hope, and Hope for Change. We still have no substance, but at least his true colors are beginning to show through.

I guess I need to point out that there was no racial slur or implication intended by the use of colors in the preceding paragraph because no one can open their mouth against Barack without it being considered a racial slur or racist remark. Personally, I think the man needs to take a chill pill and get over it, no one is really concerned about the color of his skin, they are concerned with the depth of his character.

When it comes to racism, Barack’s spiritual advisor, the right reverend Jeremiah Wright takes the cake, and we all need to be concerned with the amount of influence that Wright can bring to bear on Obama if he were to make it to the White House.